The Subtweet: A Novel

by Vivek Shraya

Overview

2021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction
2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist

“The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review

“A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media.” — Booklist

Includes an exclusive free soundtrack

Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen.

Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela’s songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770415256
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Pages:	248
Sales rank:	637,640
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)
Lexile:	930L (what's this?)

About the Author

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theater, and film. Her bestselling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part-Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. A five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek has also received honors from the Writers’ Trust of Canada and the Publishing Triangle. She is a director on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation and an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Calgary.

Read an Excerpt

Neela Devaki was an original.

She was reminded of this fact shortly after she stepped out of her cab and into the Fairmont Hotel, the main site for the North by Northeast Festival. Zipping through the masses of musicians, fans and industry reps, she felt sorry for the chandeliers, which loomed above like golden flying saucers, forced to light up the dull networking that buzzed beneath them. But a conversation between two art students, draped in curated thrift wear featuring strategically placed rips and holes, brought Neela to a reluctant halt. 

“I was totally working on something like this for my final project. I guess originality really is dead,” one of the women sighed, taking photos of herself, duck-faced with a pop-up art installation.

Neela skimmed the artist’s statement. The frosted toothpick statues of penises were “a comment on the current global epidemic of white demasculinization.” Why not just hang a red and white flag that said Make Art Great Again? Brevity was the true endangered species.

“You should still do it. All the good ideas are taken anyways. Isn’t that kind of freeing?” replied the other.

Neela snorted. She would never offer that sort of “comfort” to a stunted peer. No wonder she was bored with most of the art she encountered.

She considered sharing with these young women that she always knew she was on the verge of invention at the precise moment when originality felt impossible. That instead of surrendering to despair, she would needle in and out and through her brain until an idea surfaced — naked, stripped of predictability and familiarity. That this process often required her to sing a phrase over and over for hours until the syllables carved their own unique melody out of hollow air. She was certain that the reiteration planted the words in her vocal chords so that when she sang them, they carried the imprint of her body. By embedding herself into her song, she muted any risk of passing off mimicry as art. Why wasn’t fully committing to creation more desirable than observing what everyone else was doing and doing the same?

But defending the sanctity of originality to strangers at an art exhibit would make her seem like an egomaniac. And no one listens to a cocksure woman.

Reading Group Guide

The Subtweet Discussion Questions

1. Neela thinks, “No one listens to a cocksure woman.” How did you respond to her confidence? Do you think you would respond differently if she were a man? Can you think of positive representations of confident women in pop culture?
2. The Subtweet is an intertextual book, with song lyrics, tweets, emails, texts, critical theory, and news stories. How did these other kinds of communication affect your reading? How do you approach them differently in real life?
3. There are very few men and white people in The Subtweet , and the few who do appear are satirized. Why do you think the author made this choice, and how did it affect your reading of the book?
4. Are cover songs art? How should we acknowledge various creators who contributed to a work? Whose labour is often overlooked in the creation of a song or a book? Is that labour art?
5. Most of the book switches between two narrators. What useful perspective does this give you? How does it make you see events differently? In the book’s third section, the narrator shifts to first person. What did you think of this switch?
6. What do you think this book says about call-out culture? What has been your experience of call-out culture? Where can it be beneficial and where can it be harmful?
7. The Subtweet contains both a desire to be seen and a fear of it. How does social media intensify this? Is being seen riskier for some people than for others?
8. The Subtweet is a book without romantic relationships. In what ways is Neela and Rukmini’s friendship like a romance? Can you think of other novels without any romantic relationships whatsoever? When Neela creates Selfhood is she experiencing romance with herself?
9. Sumi remains unapologetic about her article and claims she simply reported the facts. Do you agree with her? Do you think she’s being completely honest with herself?
10. What do you think of Neela and Kasi’s performance of “Wanting” at the end of the novel? How does it tie in the other women?
11. Why do you think the author chose not to bring back Rukmini after the subtweet? Do you think Neela and Rukmini ever reconcile?
12. Subaltern Speaks’s song “Wanting” contains the line “wanting is dangerous.” Why is wanting dangerous? Is it more dangerous for women, for people of colour?
13. Consider the epigraph: how does capitalism affect the events of the story?
14. What’s more important: the creation of art of the interpretation of art? How important is the audience?

Editorial Reviews

A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media … In this timely novel, Shraya speaks to a modern audience with bold cultural insight, confronting the difficulties of being a brown artist and the drastic impact social media can have on pop culture.” — Booklist

“With the freedom that fiction provides, Shraya took The Subtweet deep into the topics of hate-liking, social media friendships, and Internet celebrities. And the plot, as fast-paced as life on the Internet, shows clearly the way that jealousy and obsession can take shape within the open borders of the online world.” — NPR Books

“Vivek Shraya’s The Subtweet is a sharp, encompassing story … A piercing satire played out against diverse creative energies, The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review

“It is clear that Shraya is pouring everything she’s learned from years of writing and making music into a text that combines rhythm and deft technique in bitingly original ways. It is equally clear in The Subtweet that Shraya is using the vehicle of fiction to hash out many of the valid frustrations she’s accumulated over years of navigating the Canadian culture scene … Shraya skilfully shows this complexity by depicting characters who are frequently ridiculous, petty, and even malicious, while simultaneously pushing readers to understand the underlying systemic factors driving their frustrating actions.” — Quill & Quire

“Writing with all the zippy thrill of good gossip.” — O, Oprah Magazine

From the Publisher